The present invention relates to a system for opening and closing doors in furniture, rooms and the like.
As is known, the classic and most basic system of opening and closing doors using hinges, and the more complex system of opening and closing folding doors, both require a certain amount of space in front of the doors in order to allow them to open.
There is an alternative opening system using sliding doors which does not require any space in front of the doors. In this ease the doors run on mutually parallel tracks. They are not, therefore, in alignment with each other and this means that they take up more space, are unattractive from an aesthetic point of view and are not completely dust-proof.
In order to satisfy the need to have doors that are aligned in the closed position and yet do not take up any space as they are opened, a system also exists in which the doors are in fact aligned in the closed position and each door is opened by moving it in a direction perpendicular to the plane of alignment of the doors and then sliding it along a plane parallel with this plane of alignment. The doors are, of course, closed by carrying out these movements in reverse.
The latter system requires the use of carriages, tracks, pulleys and cords to move each door in the abovementioned perpendicular direction, as well as an upper and lower track, together with associated rollers, to slide each door sideways; there is also a lower sliding track which is common to the doors; and, lastly, a device must also be provided for immobilizing the lower track of the door when the latter is pulled outwards before it is slid sideways.
This system is certainly efficient, but it is also rather complex in terms of its mechanics, and this increases production costs as well as reducing its reliability over time.